by Richard Wright

Richard Wright, born in 1908 near Natchez, Mississippi, moved to Chicago with his family in 1927. In doing so the Wrights joined a steady stream of black families who left behind Southern poverty and racism to search for a better life in the North, in what came to be known as the "Great Migration." Often, however, they merely ended up trading rural poverty for urban squalor, with only superficial changes in the racism of the surrounding white society. This oppressive urban environment forms the backdrop to Native Son, Wright's first full-length novel.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Great Migration. Blacks had begun leaving the South in significant numbers near the end of the nineteenth century, but in the period during and after World War I these numbers jumped dramatically. Between 1915 and 1930, over one million black Americans made the journey north...